It’s been noted that, rather like Rizzo in MUPPET’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, I am not suited to literature. Or, more accurately, I’m not suited to literary fiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read smart books, I’ve enjoyed smart books, and I think I’ve understood smart books (they’re about girls, right?), but the older I get, the less tolerance I have for capital-L Literature. There’s only so often I can cope with a story about ennui and aging and the sheer thinginess of life.

(This is obviously a broad, sweeping generalisation. Literary fiction can be about so much more than the weight of life, just like genre fiction doesn’t have to be devoid of heavy themes to be enjoyable.)

The book group I currently attend was formed (in part) because everyone was fed up of reading books about middle-aged professors who are consumed with ennui and therefore absolutely must start an affair with their nubile young secretaries. If you personally happen to like those sort of books, good on you, whatever floats your boat. But speaking for myself, there’s only so much of that I can take before I start wishing the author had written in a salty dragon or a car chase or something.

Anyway, in my 2020 quest to read the library, it occurs to me that I’m going to run into more Literary Fiction than I usually consume.

Which brings us nicely to THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS.

From her lookout on the first floor, Ginny watches and waits for her younger sister to return to the crumbling mansion that was once their idyllic childhood home. Vivien has not set foot in the house since she left, forty-seven years ago; Ginny, the reclusive moth expert, has rarely ventured outside it.

But with Vivien's arrival, dark, unspoken secrets surface. Told in Ginny's unforgettable voice, this debut novel tells a disquieting story of two sisters and the ties that bind - sometimes a little too tightly.

Incidentally, you can tell I read too much YA, because I was completely caught off guard on page 1 by the protagonist being an old woman (I didn’t read the blurb before I started). When was the last time I read a book about proper grownups?? But apart from that, okay, we’ve got a crumbling gothic house (lovely), dark family secrets (even better), and an unexpected wealth of information about moths (perfect!). Honestly, the level of details about moths, pupal soup, parasites and larvae might put off some people. When the narrator starts cutting open chrysalises to examine the soupy goo inside, or when she finds a caterpillar that’s being eaten alive from the inside by the parasitic larvae of another creature... it’d probably be too much of an ick-factor for many readers.

But, predictably enough, the forensic details about moths were my favourite bits of the book. The rest of it was a bit... literary for me. There are flashbacks to Ginny’s childhood, involving trauma and death and alcoholism and neglect. There’s an insistence on skipping over explanations and salient plot-points: Ginny has a habit of tuning out anything she’s not interested in hearing about, which leaves the audience to fill in a lot of gaps. And then there’s some stuff that happens at the end, explained away with a bit of hand-waving about free will (or the lack of it), and then the book finishes.

It was okay. I liked the stuff about moths. But it does make me worry that I’m going to struggle with other Literary books this year...

So, onwards into the Bs! Our library has 19 full shelves of authors beginning with B, so I’ll need a random number generator to pick a shelf for me. Update on Friday.